Future Marketing Skills
1. Adopt a Growth Mindset
Jim collins in his book, Good to Great, set out to discover what made some companies go from being good to great. He embarked on a five-year study of eleven companies whose stock returns had skyrocketed relative to their competitors. There were several important factors, but one of the most important was the type of leader who led the company into greatness. They were not the larger-than- life characters who were full of ego and self-proclaimed talent.
They were modest people, who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront brutal answers. To look failure in the face, even their own, with the belief they would succeed in the end.
They had a Growth Mindset. That is, they believed in Human Development, they believed in Human Capital.
This is fundamental to addressing skills, as Growth Mindset leaders and teams are constantly looking to improve. They face their own weaknesses and ask frankly what skills do they and the company need in the future. Having a Growth Mindset enables them to move forwards based on facts, sometimes facing hard truths that there are skills gaps, not unfounded fantasies about their talent or abilities.
Having a Growth Mindset is the skill of skills. It is fundamental to being open to learning and developing skills as an individual, as a team and an organisation.
2. Run experiments
A key feature of a Growth Mindset organisation, or a learning organisation, is the number of experiments that they run, and is a key skill for high performing teams and organisations.
Stefan H. Thomke states in his book, Experimentation Works
“Despite being awash in information coming from every direction, today’s managers operate in an uncertain world where they lack the right data to inform strategic and tactical decisions. Consequently, for better or worse, our actions tend to rely on experience, intuition, and beliefs. But this all too often doesn’t work. And all too often, we discover that ideas that are truly innovative go against our experience and assumptions, or the conventional wisdom.”
Relying on a manager or leader to define the viability of an idea is the definition of a Fixed Mindset, the very opposite of a Growth Mindset.
Instead, launching rapid experiments provides rapid learning and growth in knowledge for a team and business. And these often fly in the face of what you think you know.
Being open to being wrong on your assumptions, and testing and learning is fundamental to your success.
In fact, Stefan H. Thomke found that those companies that experiment significantly outperform the S&P 500 index, in what he call the Experimenters Index:
3. Share Learnings & Use Attribution Models
Sharing learnings is also a feature of a Growth Mindset organisation - learning from peers is a hugely effective way to improve skills and knowledge for the success of your teams.
In fact, estimates suggest that the companies in the Fortune 500 still lose a combined $31.5 billion per year from employees failing to share knowledge effectively.
This requires effective leadership and fostering a culture of sharing learnings through accessible spaces, meetings and processes.
Attribution models also came out as an important tool to master. Customers never follow linear journeys when buying a product, and will come across multiple touchpoints in your marketing efforts.
Attribution models simply provide a way to measure which channels and activities are delivering the greatest return on value. So you can learn which efforts to focus on to deliver greater returns.
4. Be Data-Centric
Create a strategy after running pilot projects, use data from experiments, apply insights to the next experiments. Repeat. We live in a world where technology has enabled data collection on a scale never before seen. Yet, the greatest shortcoming is that leaders and teams are not using this data to gain insights and drive decisions.
Become a data-led marketeer
Answer these 6 key questions to build your data strategy and become a data-led marketeer:
What business problem are you trying to solve?
What are your strategic marketing priorities and how can data help you achieve this?
What data do you need to answer your questions?
What data will help you solve your objective, and what do you have already that you can use?
How will you analyse the data?
What tools will help empower your data strategy? How will you store your data and protect it? Will you use the cloud?
How will you report and present insights?
Data is useless if the key insights and learning are not shared to key stakeholders to impact decision making.
What hardware and software do you need?
What are your strategic marketing priorities and how can data help you achieve this?
What’s your plan of action?
Once all of the above has been answered, you then need to create a plan to implement your data strategy. How will you get it off the ground?
